Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1980, Side 199

On the Dental Accretion
197
1 assume that in the much used preterite-present verbs, further in
vera and vilja, and in the strong preterites, the long forms such as
skaltu, ertu, viltu, hélstu, etc., were the basic variants2 of the 2. p. sg.
Pres. ind., from the morphological point of view,3 and the correspond-
ing short forms, skált, ert,4 vilt, hélst, etc., were derived from the long
forms through the clipping of the final u of the respective long forms:
skaltu minus u — skalt, ertu minus u =ert, etc. I further assume that
from such examples the clipping of u spread to long forms of verbs
other than those mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph, and thus
clipped forms came into being which were not identical with the cor-
responding short forms: the long form lestu minus u gave the clipped
form lest, and soon thereafter the long form ferðu minus u gave the
clipped form ferð, and similarly with all the instances of the lest and
ferð types.
The above explanation of the lest and ferð types can be couched in
the following more general terms. The sundry morphological forms of
the 2. p. sg. that any verb has (e. g. skalt and skaltu of skulu) are
morphological variants of the 2. p. sg; sometimes—depending on the
morphological structure of the variants involved—one of the variants
comes to be considered their basic variant (for the notion of basic
variant cf. footnote 2); the remaining variants begin to be made from
their basic variant. E.g. in the 2. p. sg. pres. ind. of skulu, skaltu be-
comes the basic variant, from which the remaining variant, skalt, begins
to be made. The rules by aid of which the non-basic variants (in our
example skalt) are derived from their basic variants (in our example
skaltu) are deduced from a number of pairs of forms, each of which
2 The basic variant is here defined as the variant which is the best linguistic
sign in a set of variants.
3 The phrase, „from the morphological point of view“, is essential here, because
the 2.p.sg. of Icelandic verbs also has syntactic variants. For instance, beside the
-■P-Sg.pres.ind. kallar and kallarðu (these are the morphological variants of the
2-P.sg.pres.ind. of kalla; they are called morphological because they consist of one
word each) there are also the syntactic variants þú kallar and kallar þú (they are
called syntactic because they consist of more than one word each). The syntactic
variants have been ignored in what follows, except in footnote 8, where it is also
pointed out that such a procedure is legitimate.
4 Est Oert) and the subjunctive sért may be early cases of the clipping of u.
This, however, does not prejudice their later role as models for other forms.